Khoros - Detailed Review
Communication Tools
Khoros - Product Overview
Khoros Overview
Khoros is a global customer engagement software company that specializes in providing comprehensive solutions for businesses to interact and engage with their customers effectively. Here’s a brief overview of its primary function, target audience, and key features:
Primary Function
Khoros serves as a unified platform for digital customer engagement, enabling businesses to connect with their customers across various channels such as social media, messaging, email, SMS, and online communities. The platform aims to build and maintain strong customer relationships by providing a seamless and personalized experience from the initial interaction to post-sale support.
Target Audience
Khoros primarily targets medium to large enterprises across diverse industries, including retail, technology, healthcare, and more. The key users within these organizations are marketing and customer experience professionals who are responsible for managing and optimizing customer interactions.
Key Features
- Integrated Platform: Khoros offers a comprehensive platform that integrates multiple customer engagement tools, allowing businesses to streamline their efforts and gain a holistic view of their customers.
- AI-Powered Insights: The platform leverages artificial intelligence to provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping businesses make informed decisions and tailor their engagement strategies.
- Community Building: Khoros enables businesses to build and nurture online communities where customers can connect with each other and with the brand, fostering loyalty and advocacy.
- Omnichannel Communication: The platform supports seamless communication across multiple channels, ensuring a consistent and cohesive customer experience.
- Scalability and Customization: Khoros is designed to scale with the growing needs of businesses and offers high customization options to align with specific business goals and requirements.
- Digital Care and Automation: The platform includes AI-powered automation for digital service, enabling enterprises to improve support efficiency and reduce costs.
By offering these features, Khoros helps businesses enhance customer satisfaction, drive loyalty, and ultimately achieve greater success in their customer engagement strategies.
Khoros - User Interface and Experience
User Interface Redesign
The Khoros Salesforce Lightning Connector, for example, features a redesigned user interface that updates the look and feel without altering the underlying functionality or workflows. This redesign includes changes to several key pages and components, such as the Federated Search Home Page, User Details, Metrics and Messages component, Recent User Messages component, Community User Metrics component, Case Details page, Community Postback Comments component, and Case Related Community Messages component. These updates aim to provide a more intuitive and visually appealing interface.
Ease of Use
Khoros has focused on enhancing ease of use across its platforms. The Khoros Communities solution now includes simpler setup capabilities and drag-and-drop design tools for customization. This allows community managers to personalize the community experience without needing costly development resources. The platform offers preconfigured templates and theming tools that enable customization of fonts, color palettes, buttons, and text, all without requiring any coding.
Drag-and-Drop Capability
The drag-and-drop capability is a significant feature that enhances usability. It allows users to design pages and customize the layout easily, making the setup and management of communities more accessible and efficient.
Moderation and Automation
The user experience is also improved through enhanced moderation tools that use AI to automate workflows and filter content. This includes AI-powered intent detection, sentiment analysis, and automated routing of customer inquiries, which help in managing and responding to customer interactions more effectively.
Personalization
Khoros emphasizes personalization, allowing community managers to tailor the experience to align with company branding. This includes custom fonts, color palettes, and consistent design elements throughout the site, ensuring a cohesive and branded user experience.
AI Integration
The integration of AI and machine learning (ML) in Khoros tools further enhances the user experience. Features such as suggested responses, intent detection, and sentiment analysis help agents respond more efficiently and authentically. The platform ensures that AI technologies complement human intelligence, focusing on creating authentic interactions and minimizing frustration.
Overall, the user interface of Khoros is designed to be user-friendly, with a focus on ease of use, personalization, and the integration of AI to improve customer engagement and management. These enhancements aim to make the platform more accessible and efficient for both administrators and end-users.
Khoros - Key Features and Functionality
Khoros Overview
Khoros, a comprehensive digital customer engagement platform, integrates advanced AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance customer service operations. Here are the key features and functionalities of Khoros in the communication tools AI-driven product category:Omnichannel Engagement
Khoros allows businesses to connect with customers across a wide variety of channels, including messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and Google Business Messages, as well as social networks such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and WeChat. This omnichannel approach ensures that customers can reach out through their preferred method, enhancing convenience and satisfaction.Conversational AI and Chatbots
Khoros features a powerful chatbot platform that uses natural language understanding (NLU) to determine customer intents and respond to common inquiries. This automation enables chatbots to handle up to 30% of inbound contacts, freeing human agents to focus on more complex tasks. The platform also allows for building a single, omnichannel chatbot that can leverage the best features of each channel, reducing the need for multiple channel-specific bots.Advanced Gen-AI Integration
The latest features include advanced generative AI (Gen-AI) capabilities, such as Helix, which automates the training of intents and designing customer journey flows. This integration significantly reduces the time and effort required for manual training, ensuring faster automation and quicker time-to-value. The ‘try-out’ feature allows conversational designers to test flows while designing Gen-AI-powered chatbots.Agent Assist and Automation
Khoros enhances agent efficiency through its agent assist feature, which provides agents with response templates sourced directly from Helix knowledge. This integration ensures that agents receive accurate and prompt responses to customer queries, improving their ability to handle inquiries effectively. The platform also offers suggested responses that automatically recommend the best reply, improving over time with machine learning.Performance Monitoring and Optimization
Khoros includes tools to monitor chatbot performance with pre-built widgets, allowing businesses to track key metrics and optimize their chatbot operations. The platform also measures bot and automation performance with the same granularity as human agents, providing detailed insights to improve overall efficiency.AI-Powered Automation Framework
The automation framework of Khoros is highly flexible, enabling complete customization and integration with third-party AI technologies. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor their automation solutions to specific needs. The platform also ensures transparency by clearly identifying which technologies use AI or ML and to what extent.Sentiment Analysis and Language Detection
Khoros uses AI to automatically determine sentiment based on text classification and track how sentiment changes throughout the conversation. It also detects the language of incoming messages to route them to the right team and enable translation technologies, ensuring that customer interactions are handled appropriately.Noise and Spam Filtering
The platform automatically filters noise and spam, focusing on meaningful interactions and reducing unnecessary workload for agents. This feature helps in maintaining the quality of customer engagements and inquiries.Proactive Engagement
Khoros allows for the automatic initiation of proactive chat messages or triggering automated responses to inbound messages. This proactive approach helps in engaging customers at key moments, improving customer satisfaction and reducing support costs.Integration and Customization
With open APIs, Khoros offers seamless integration with various systems and provides failover protection and resolution reporting to improve bot performance. Non-technical employees can easily build chatbot solutions using the intuitive drag-and-drop platform, making it accessible to a broader range of users. By integrating these features, Khoros provides a comprehensive solution that enhances customer engagement, automates routine tasks, and improves the overall efficiency of customer service operations. Khoros - Performance and Accuracy
Evaluating Khoros in AI-Driven Communication Tools
Evaluating the performance and accuracy of Khoros in the AI-driven communication tools category reveals several key strengths and some areas for improvement.
Performance
Khoros demonstrates strong performance in several areas:
AI-Powered Automation
Khoros uses AI to automate routine interactions, such as welcoming customers, triaging issues, and resolving common inquiries through chatbots. This automation enhances efficiency and accuracy, allowing agents to focus on more complex issues.
Asynchronous Communication
The platform supports asynchronous communication, enabling agents to handle multiple conversations simultaneously, whether in real-time or at any other time. This feature increases the number of concurrent conversations agents can manage.
Unified Engagement Platform
Khoros allows for the handling of chats and messages from various channels like WhatsApp and Instagram on a single dashboard, streamlining agent workflows and improving response times.
Operational Analytics
The platform provides live workforce utilization metrics, helping in planning, forecasting, and improving agent performance. It also captures comprehensive customer experience metrics, which aids in making informed decisions.
Accuracy
The accuracy of Khoros is enhanced by several features:
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Khoros employs NLP for precise, intent-based classification of customer inquiries. This results in more accurate tagging and routing of conversations to the appropriate agents, improving the quality and resolution rates of interactions.
Persistent Conversations
The platform ensures that customer conversations are persistent across devices and time, maintaining context and reducing the need for customers to repeat their issues.
Holistic Customer Profile
Khoros provides a complete customer profile that includes information from various channels, CRM systems, tags, and internal notes. This comprehensive profile helps agents respond more accurately and contextually.
Limitations and Areas for Improvement
Despite its strengths, there are some limitations and areas where Khoros could improve:
Customization Challenges
Users have reported that customizations on the Khoros platform can be cumbersome and expensive. Nearly 44% of users rate the customization capabilities as average or below, and the cost of these customizations is often cited as a hindrance to community growth.
Integration Complications
Integrating Khoros with existing IT infrastructure can be complicated, especially for large organizations with complex systems. This can lead to headaches and slower implementation times.
Support Response Times
There have been complaints about slow response times from Khoros support, which can be frustrating for users needing timely assistance.
Upgrade Implementation Time
Some users have reported that implementing upgrades on the platform can take too long, with 11% stating it takes more than 7 weeks. This lack of agility can be problematic for communities needing quick responses to trending issues.
In summary, Khoros performs well in terms of AI-driven automation, asynchronous communication, and operational analytics, which contribute to its accuracy and efficiency. However, it faces challenges related to customization, integration, support response times, and the time required for implementing upgrades. Addressing these areas could further enhance the overall performance and user satisfaction of the platform.
Khoros - Pricing and Plans
The Pricing Structure of Khoros
The pricing structure of Khoros, particularly in their social media management and customer engagement tools, is largely customized and quotation-based, especially for large enterprises. Here are the key points to consider:
Custom Pricing
Khoros does not offer standard, publicly listed pricing plans. Instead, they provide custom pricing based on the specific needs of their clients, particularly large enterprises.
No Free Plan
Khoros does not offer a free plan. Users must contact the vendor to get a quote for their specific requirements.
Different Solutions
Khoros offers several solutions, each with its own set of features:
- Marketing: Focuses on social media marketing and engagement. This includes content scheduling, publishing, and campaign tracking.
- Care: Centers on customer service and engagement on social media.
- Communities: Aims at building and managing branded communities.
Features
While the exact features vary based on the customized plans, here are some general features:
- Content scheduling and publishing across multiple social media accounts.
- Social media monitoring and analytics, although some users have noted that the analytics side is not as strong as other tools.
- Integration with major social networks and key business tools, providing a streamlined integration experience.
Contract and Usage Costs
For some of their offerings, such as the Digital First Customer Engagement Platform available on AWS Marketplace, pricing is based on contract duration. Users pay upfront or in installments according to their contract terms. Additional usage costs may apply for units over the contractually agreed amount.
Given the customized nature of Khoros’s pricing, it is essential to contact the vendor directly to get an accurate quote and to understand the specific features and costs associated with your needs.
Khoros - Integration and Compatibility
Channel Integration
Khoros connects seamlessly with various social, digital, review, and community channels. This includes popular platforms like Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp Business, Google My Business, and many more.
- For example, on Twitter, you can listen for insights, publish content for revenue, and engage for customer support.
- On WhatsApp Business, you can publish proactive sales and service messages, deflect calls, and automate interactions with bots.
- Khoros also integrates with review sites such as Yelp, TrustPilot, and over 100 other review networks to manage reputation and analyze customer feedback.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
Khoros is a digital-first platform that allows you to connect with customers across multiple channels, including messaging, chat, social media, email, SMS, and external or branded communities. This ensures that you can engage with customers wherever they prefer to interact.
AI and Automation
The platform leverages AI to automate customer interactions across all channels. Khoros AI provides a single command center to build automations, deploy them seamlessly, and measure efficiency. It integrates with any AI service or automation, offering flexibility and control over AI parameters and brand safety.
Integration with Other Business Systems
Khoros solutions are powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and integrate with other AWS services like Amazon Connect and Lex. This integration extends to hundreds of other business-critical systems such as CRM and Workforce Management (WFM) tools, ensuring a unified and cohesive digital ecosystem.
Community Engagement
For community engagement, Khoros can be integrated with other platforms like Influitive. This involves setting up OAuth authentication, enabling event subscriptions, and integrating specific components such as the Challenge Carousel and Recruitment Component to enhance community engagement and member experiences.
Unified Contact Center
The Khoros Contact Center offering blends voice, synchronous chat, and asynchronous messaging into one unified desktop. This supports over 30 channels, including voice, chat, web and in-app messaging, social media, email, SMS, and reviews. The platform is deployment-ready, secure, and PCI compliant, with low-code or no-code configuration options for fast deployments and channel expansion.
In summary, Khoros offers comprehensive integration and compatibility features that enable businesses to engage with customers across a wide array of channels and platforms, leveraging AI and automation to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.
Khoros - Customer Support and Resources
Khoros Customer Support Overview
Khoros offers a comprehensive suite of customer support options and additional resources, particularly within their AI-driven communication tools. Here are the key features and resources they provide:Omnichannel Support
Khoros enables businesses to offer 24/7 support across multiple channels, including email, chat, social media, and phone. This omnichannel approach ensures customers can reach out through their preferred method and receive consistent, seamless support.AI-Powered Chatbots
Khoros Bot is an AI-powered chatbot platform that automates conversations and helps contain up to 30% of inbound contacts. This bot uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to classify customer intents, route and prioritize inquiries based on sentiment, intent, and context, and provides analytics to track trends and outcomes.Self-Service and Automation
The platform includes AI-powered self-service features that automate common, predictable inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on more complex tasks. This automation helps reduce agent time and increases efficiency by managing high volumes of customer interactions across any channel.Unified Agent Desktop
Khoros Service features an intuitive, omnichannel agent desktop that integrates all customer service channels into one place. This desktop provides agents with all the necessary information exactly when they need it, enhancing their ability to handle customer inquiries efficiently.IVR Deflection
Khoros offers IVR deflection capabilities to reduce calls by redirecting customers to more efficient, asynchronous messaging channels. This includes custom routing rules and the ability to manage timely trends or volume spikes.Integration Capabilities
The platform integrates with a wide variety of messaging channels, including chat, social media, mobile messaging, and voice assistants. This allows businesses to build a single, omnichannel chatbot that leverages the best features of each channel.Analytics and Insights
Khoros provides unified analytics to give businesses the insights they need to optimize their customer service operations. These analytics help in understanding trends by intent, channel, and outcome, which is crucial for improving the customer experience.Support Models
Khoros offers flexible support models, including self-service, supported service, and fully managed service tiers. This ensures that businesses of any size can build, manage, and optimize their chatbots according to their expertise and resources.Case Studies and Success Stories
Khoros shares several case studies and success stories, such as how Jawwy doubled digital care volume and cut costs, and how Midco improved customer satisfaction and deflected calls. These examples provide practical insights into how businesses can benefit from Khoros’ solutions. By leveraging these features and resources, businesses can significantly enhance their customer support capabilities, improve efficiency, and provide a better customer experience. Khoros - Pros and Cons
Advantages of Khoros
Khoros offers several significant advantages, particularly in the realm of digital customer engagement and community building:User-Friendly Interface
Khoros is known for its easy-to-use interface, making it simple for users to engage with content and navigate the platform.Customization
The platform allows for a high level of customization, enabling businesses to create a unique user experience that aligns with their brand. This includes flexible design options and mobile compatibility.SEO Optimization
Khoros pages are optimized for search engines, which helps users find content more easily.Reliable Performance
Khoros has a strong track record of uptime, ensuring that communities are always accessible to users.AI-Powered Features
The platform integrates generative AI, advanced automation, and digital engagement tools to create a seamless support experience. This includes features like advanced routing, classification, alerts, and chatbots.Multi-Channel Support
Khoros allows businesses to connect with customers across various channels, including social media, messaging, chat, email, and SMS. This ensures comprehensive coverage and consistent customer engagement.Community Building
Khoros is effective in building and maintaining vibrant online communities. It provides features such as peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.Data Insights
The platform tracks data across every interaction and every channel, providing a full picture of the customer experience. This helps in improving customer satisfaction and reducing support costs.Enterprise Scale
Khoros is built for enterprise scale, handling high volume usage, deployment complexity, and the security needs of large brands.Disadvantages of Khoros
Despite its many benefits, Khoros also has some notable drawbacks:Innovation Pace
Khoros has been slow to launch new features, with significant delays in projects like the Aurora user experience update.Customization Challenges
While customization is a strength, it can also be difficult and requires expertise in design and template scripting. The Professional Services team, which is necessary for complex customizations, has been criticized for being slow and difficult to work with.High Pricing
Khoros is priced at the higher end of the market, making it unaffordable for some organizations. This can be a significant barrier, especially for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.Staff Turnover
Khoros has experienced high levels of staff turnover since its merger with Spredfast, which can lead to inconsistent customer support and management.Learning Curve
The back-end administrative interface can present a steep learning curve, and some features, such as reporting and analytics, may not be as flexible or user-friendly as needed.Feature Overload
Some users have reported that not all features of Khoros fit their needs, leading to a situation where the cost may not be justified by the usage. By considering these pros and cons, businesses can make a more informed decision about whether Khoros is the right fit for their community and customer engagement needs. Khoros - Comparison with Competitors
Unique Features of Khoros
- AI-Powered Automation: Khoros integrates AI to automate routine interactions, using tools like Khoros Bot to handle high-volume inquiries and self-service tasks. This automation can be extended across all customer interaction channels.
- Asynchronous Communication: Khoros allows agents to handle multiple conversations simultaneously, whether in real-time or at any other time, without session timeouts. This enhances agent efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Unified Engagement Platform: Khoros offers a single dashboard to manage chats and messages from various channels, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. This unified approach simplifies customer engagement and streamlines workflows.
- Advanced Workflows and Operational Analytics: Khoros provides features to automatically filter, tag, prioritize, and route conversations to the most appropriate agents. It also includes operational analytics for better workforce utilization and performance metrics.
- Persistent Conversations: Khoros ensures that customer conversations remain contextually intact across devices and time, allowing customers to re-engage at their convenience.
Potential Alternatives
Drift
Drift is a conversational marketing platform that uses chatbots and AI-driven messaging to automate and personalize customer communication. It is particularly strong in qualifying leads, booking meetings, and providing instant customer support on websites and social media platforms. While Drift focuses more on lead qualification and sales, it lacks the broad customer service and social media management capabilities of Khoros.
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is an AI-powered customer service platform that prioritizes tickets, manages emails, knowledge bases, and mobile queries. It includes a multilingual assistant and focuses on making customer service an experience rather than just a task. However, Zoho Desk does not offer the same level of unified engagement across multiple channels or the advanced analytics and automation seen in Khoros.
FreshDesk
FreshDesk is another customer support system that prioritizes tickets and fosters team collaboration. It ensures smooth customer journeys but does not match Khoros in terms of AI-powered automation, unified engagement, or advanced operational analytics.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a well-known customer service platform that offers ticket prioritization and team collaboration features. While it is strong in managing customer support, it lacks the comprehensive AI automation, asynchronous communication, and unified engagement platform that Khoros provides.
Key Differences
- Scalability: Khoros is built for enterprise-level scalability, offering deep analytics and reporting that go beyond what smaller-scale solutions like Sprout Social or FreshDesk provide. Khoros is designed to grow with the company’s digital programs, making it a better fit for large enterprises.
- Comprehensive Solution: Khoros offers a broader range of features, including social media management, customer service, and community management, all within a single platform. This contrasts with more specialized tools like Drift, which focus primarily on conversational marketing.
In summary, while alternatives like Drift, Zoho Desk, FreshDesk, and Zendesk offer valuable features in customer communication and support, Khoros stands out with its comprehensive AI-powered automation, unified engagement platform, and advanced analytics, making it a strong choice for enterprises seeking a scalable and holistic solution.
Khoros - Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions about Khoros
What are the key features of Khoros Modern Chat?
Khoros Modern Chat offers several key features, including AI-powered automation, asynchronous communication, a unified engagement platform, advanced workflows, and operational analytics. It allows for real-time or anytime conversations, ensuring chats end when the customer issue is resolved, not when the session times out. Additionally, it includes features like persistent conversations across devices, holistic customer profiles, and notifications & alerts to adjust staffing and priorities.How does Khoros integrate with various communication channels?
Khoros provides a unified engagement platform that allows businesses to manage chats and messages from multiple channels, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and other messaging apps, all from a single dashboard. This integration ensures seamless communication across different platforms and maintains context and continuity across interactions.What AI capabilities does Khoros offer for customer service?
Khoros offers extensive AI capabilities for customer service, including AI-powered self-service options, chatbots, and agent-facing automation. These tools help resolve customer inquiries faster and more accurately. Khoros AI can build, manage, and optimize bots for custom automation experiences, utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) for automated routing and prioritization, and provide AI-driven guides and quick responses for agents.Can Khoros support 24/7 omnichannel customer service?
Yes, Khoros enables businesses to offer 24/7 omnichannel support. With its AI-powered tools, customers can initiate inquiries through one channel (e.g., chat on a website) and continue the conversation through another channel (e.g., email) without having to repeat information. This ensures consistent and seamless support across multiple service channels.How does Khoros help in managing and optimizing customer interactions?
Khoros provides advanced workflows that automatically filter, tag, prioritize, and route customer interactions to the most appropriate work queue or agent for prompt resolution. It also offers operational analytics to plan and forecast better, improve agent performance, and capture customer experience metrics. Additionally, Khoros allows for the management of high volumes of customer interactions with its bot and AI-driven tools.What kind of analytics and metrics does Khoros provide?
Khoros offers operational analytics and modern metrics to measure agent performance and customer experience. These analytics help in planning and forecasting workforce utilization, improving agent performance, and capturing comprehensive customer experience metrics. The platform also provides live workforce utilization metrics and holistic customer profiles to respond with more context.Does Khoros offer any customization options for its AI and automation tools?
Yes, Khoros provides customization options for its AI and automation tools. Businesses can use Khoros’ open automation APIs to orchestrate automation for their specific needs. The platform also allows for the integration of any AI service or automation, giving brands flexibility and control over their AI parameters and brand safety controls.How does Khoros pricing work?
Khoros pricing is customized based on the specific needs and scale of the organization. It does not offer a one-size-fits-all pricing model. Instead, potential users must contact Khoros directly for a quote. The pricing reflects the broad range of features, including advanced analytics, extensive integration options, and dedicated customer support.Does Khoros offer any free plans or trials?
No, Khoros does not offer a free plan. However, it does provide a free trial for some of its products, allowing businesses to test the features before committing to a purchase.How does Khoros support agent efficiency and productivity?
Khoros equips agents and managers with unmatched out-of-the-box productivity and operational metrics. The platform offers AI-driven guides and quick responses, advanced workflows, and operational analytics to improve agent efficiency. It also allows agents to handle a higher number of concurrent conversations in real-time or anytime.